She had done every one of them without being asked, and the blanket was warm. It carried the faint scent of the herbs she kept in her room. Clay did not dwell on that. He was the sort of man who noticed things, then stored them away in some orderly corner of his mind. That was what he did now.
But this time he did not put the memory quite so far away. Around then he began noticing other small changes inside the cabin. Things he had never asked for, things he had never expected. A bundle of dried sage appeared near the door. It was not decoration.
Nia used it to freshen the air after cooking, the way her people did in their winter dwellings. Near the stove, an old horsehide rug appeared, salvaged from what remained of the barn. It made the frozen floor a little easier to bear on cold mornings. The firewood had changed, too. Nia stacked it in a crossed pattern clay had never seen before, and somehow it kept the wood drier whenever rain or snow came through.
The next time he hauled in a fresh load, he tried arranging it the same way. It worked. Clay said nothing about it. Neither did she. Things appeared.
Things improved. That was simply how it happened. One evening, after checking the cattle, Clay came inside and found Nia sitting sideways on the bench at the table, staring through the window into the dark sky. A strip of rawhide rested between her hands. She had been working it, but her fingers had gone still.
She seemed to be watching something Clay could not see. He sat across from her and waited. My father used to say, Nia murmured after a while, never looking away from the window, that the stars over the Sacramento mountains were closer than anywhere else he had ever been. He said the mountain carried a person nearer to them. She paused.
I don't know if it was true. I think he said it so the cold would seem to have some purpose. That's a good thing to tell someone, Klay said. He said many good things, Nia turned toward him. He was wiser than I am.
You're wiser than you think, Klay replied. He did not say it to comfort her. He said it the way a man states something he has already seen, proven with his own eyes. Nia studied him for several seconds with an expression he could not quite read. Then she lowered her gaze, picked up the raw hide again, and returned to her work.
Clay rose to tend the fire. Outside, the stars above the Sacramento mountains really did seem unusually close. He did not mention it. Nia understood plants the way Clay understood the land, without effort, as though the knowledge had grown into her bones. Since childhood, Toma had trained her in the messcalero tradition of plant medicine.